Everything Sad Is Untrue: (A True Story)

ISBN: 9781646140008
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Overview

At the front of a middle school classroom in Oklahoma, a boy named Khosrou (whom everyone calls "Daniel") stands, trying to tell a story. His story. But no one believes a word he says. To them he is a dark-skinned, hairy-armed boy with a big butt whose lunch smells funny; who makes things up and talks about poop too much.

But Khosrou's stories, stretching back years, and decades, and centuries, are beautiful, and terrifying, from the moment his family fled Iran in the middle of the night with the secret police moments behind them, back to the sad, cement refugee camps of Italy.and further back to the fields near the river Aras, where rain-soaked flowers bled red like the yolk of sunset burst over everything, and further back still to the Jasmine-scented city of Isfahan.

We bounce between a school bus of kids armed with paper clip missiles and spitballs to the heroines and heroes of Khosrou's family's past, who ate pastries that made people weep and cry "Akh, Tamar " and touched carpets woven with precious gems.

Like Scheherazade in a hostile classroom, Daniel weaves a tale to save his own life: to stake his claim to the truth. And it is (a true story).

It is Daniel's.

  • Format: Hardcover
  • Author: Nayeri, Daniel
  • ISBN: 9781646140008
  • Condition: Used
  • Dimensions: 8.40 x 1.30
  • Number Of Pages: 368
  • Publication Year: 2020

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  • “Hope. The anticipation that the God who listens in love will one day speak justice…that will make everything sad untrue.”

    Jennifer E. - 4 years 3 months ago

    “Oklahoma has more tornadoes than anywhere on earth…that means they don’t just have a god who listens or a god who speaks, but a god who puts his finger in the dirt and swirls it…I think He’s a God who listens as if we are his most important children, and I think He speaks to tell us so…Is there an idea so big that God doesn’t remember anything before it? That answer is love. Love is the object of unusual size.” Although “a patchwork memory is the shame of refugees,” Daniel Nayeri’s memoir is filled with “Hope. The anticipation that the God who listens in love will one day speak justice…that some final fantasy will come to pass that will make everything sad untrue.” If “the salute is a Persian symbol for shielding your eyes from the light of greatness when a boss comes in the room,” then, Daniel Nayeri, I salute you. Thank you for reaching “across time and space and every ordinary thing to see so deep into the heart of each other that you might agree that I am like you…like you, I was made carefully, by a God who loved what He saw.” Thank you for introducing me to myself: “You’re not a liar. You’re just Persian in your own way, with a flaw…If you put a little hole in the same spot of every rug, then it’s not a flaw anymore, it’s the design.” “If we really listen in the parlors of our minds and look at each other as we were meant to be seen–then we would fall in love. We would marvel at how beautifully we were made. We would never think to be villain kings, and we would never kill each other. Just the opposite. The stories aren’t the thing. The thing is the story of the story. The spending of the time. The falling in love.” An unstoppable mother, an unhurtable son, and an unfathomable God: Everything Sad Is Untrue is unforgettable.